Child Victims Are Not Fodder for Your Propaganda

The alt-right is manipulating young people and using their stories to fuel book-banning rhetoric

How low can you go?

Just when I thought it was not possible, far-right extremists have reached a new low. The book-banning brigade is manipulating young people who have been victims of adult predators, making these youth believe it’s their fault they were groomed, exploited, and abused because they were reading “explicit” literature. I exaggerate not. Segments from a video series posted by the Lighthouse Project (a project funded by the creators of Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation, by the way) is making the rounds on social media.

This multi-part series of videos features a minor who is now 17, but was in middle school during the years she describes. The videos do not hide her face, despite her being a minor. This means that, not only did the Lighthouse Project choose to show her face, her parent(s) also signed permission because (as far as I’m aware), YouTube requires consent before posting videos of someone else’s children.

To me, the video segments I saw (about 4 minutes in total) reek of coaching and indoctrination. I obviously don’t know this person, so I could be wrong, but an adolescent using phrases like “explicit descriptions of sex”, “readily accessible”, and “it was normalized” sounds very much like she is regurgitating words she’s been fed. Within the first minute of the video, she claims that during online learning she accessed romance stories online, and those were not explicit in nature, but the books she was recommended at her middle-school library were sexually explicit.

I call bullshit. She even stumbled, saying “the books that I had found—and had been recommended”, as though she had messed up her line. While speaking she looks up, seemingly trying to recall the words she’s supposed to say.